Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

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Sun, 01 Feb 2009

Complaints, complaints, complaints:

Yes, I got the email to tell me that my February issue of PCMag was ready for me. Following the link, I got the chance to create my password and BAM! there I was looking at the chance to get my own copy and not be tethered to the internet. PC, Mac...NO LINUX. Bad news. Deal Breaker.

Well, move on to web access. At least I get all the...benefits...of a realistic simulacrum of a paper magazine. How retro. Aside from the "comfort" of seeing a fake magazine page, I get to see all the details by zooming in with a tap of the Enter key, or, well, maybe Shift-Enter. What a tech breakthrough.

By now, I bet you can sense my dismay. This isn't Web 2.0 or Web 1.5 or even Web 1.0. PCMag is apparently trying to continue to "sell buggy whips in the age of automobiles" to borrow a phrase from somebody.

Tell Mr. Lance Ulanoff (PCMag Editor in Chief) that this reader isn't happy at all. PCMag isn't "digital" in format or benefits to me.

I went to the normal PCMag web site and there, I find the "current" issue is January. I guess I will be patient. I can always be "up to date" a month late as people in the US West were when reading their publications from New York in the early 1800s.

The Zinio delivery system seems a bit out of date. Seeing magazine page images on my screen is really more like a color electronic version of the FAX, originally invented in 1843, just slightly ahead of the telephone, not what I would call much of a challenge in 2009. The magazine pages did have "live" links, but they, too, were dead for me. Is my Firefox/Linux laptop not PC enough?

I was mostly ready to blame PCMag for the whole problem until I tried to flip pages to read more than just the editorial with glowing suggestion that this "digital" magazine was a "welcome to the future" and I got the following message:

"There was an error downloading the high-quality image of this page. Please try again later. Timeout error in DefaultMediaHolder: the content may be corrupt."

That message clearly indicates that the Zinio "FAX machine" is broken. I have a nice broadband connection to the internet through Verizon Fios, and everything downloads fast enough at my end of the wire.